“Oh, I try frightfully hard to lie,” said Tam. “I am always deeply disappointed if I do not succeed in deceiving everyone I know about what I am and what I have whenever I want to.” He spoke of himself with great confidence and with an obvious certainty that whatever he chose to say about himself was interesting. One felt that he would just as complacently have explained that he always used Vinolia Soap or that he preferred silk socks to woollen ones. “Oh, you naughty, naughty man!” said Melsie Ponting. “As for me, I only lie to make a funny yarn funnier. I never mean to deceive a fly.” “I lie to save myself from myself,” said Edward. He thought this sounded modest and tragic. “I lie when I am angry or when I am frightened,” said Rhoda. “If I were always calm I should never lie at all, I guess. Except that I never tell anything that happened to me exactly the way it happened.” “I have no conscience at all,” Banner Hope said. “I remember when my Momma used to catch me stealing the candies....” “Truth,” announced Avery Bird, “is a bastard begotten by a steam-locomotive and born of the scent of jasmine—if you get me. Truth is the ghost of a decadent vice, clanking steel chains; Mary Magdalene was crucified on truth instead of a wooden cross——” “Oh, for the land’s sake, Avery,” exclaimed Rhoda. “Do you have to act so damned complex? Nobody gets you, believe me. It’s because he’s a Jew....” she added apologetically to the others as she took Avery’s hand. “I think you’re all posing,” said Emily. Her clenched hands became slack, as though with disappointment. “If I began to say how much I lied I should pose as a miserable sinner. Yet I do lie, to save myself from the anger—which I deserve—of other people. And I lie often in order to seem uniquely honest. Oh, hang it all, there’s no getting away from pose after all. We’re all posing as liars now because it’s more popular and funny to be liars——” “Lucy didn’t,” said Tam, as though Lucy were his property. Emily interrupted, “It was the talk of reading and writing that reminded me. While I was lying in the sun before supper I tried to read George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man. I thought Tam would presently ask me what I thought of it and I began trying and trying to think of something clever I could say—something that would sound so clever that even Tam wouldn’t dare to strip the skin of cleverness from what I should say and see how light and womanly was the core of my thinking. And then I thought it would be fun to say to myself what I really did think, not trying to show off. So I read the book with one hand and wrote everything that occurred to me with the other.” “Well, I suppose we’d better hear what you wrote,” said Tam, knocking out his pipe in a jovially resigned way. “Tam, don’t you really want to hear?” “I see you are determined to let us hear.”